ESSAYS: SECOND SERIES E-SSAYS, BY R. W. EMERSON SECOND SERIES. BOSTON: TICKNOR AND F I K I, D S MDCCCI.XVIII. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the Tear 1856, by R. W. KHERSON, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of CONTENTS. ESSAY I. THE POET, ESSAY H. EXPERIENCE 49 ESSAY HI. CHARACTER, 91 ESSAY 17. MANNERS , 119 ESSAY V GIFTS, , 155 ESSAY VI. NATURE 165 1* 2230585 D CONTENTS. ESSAY VIL POLITICS, i .... 193 ESSAY VKL NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 217 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. LECTUKE AT AMOBY HALL, 248 THE POET A moody cnild and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyrul eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray : They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege ; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star. Saw the dance of nature forward far ; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and time*, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always flrid us And always keep us BO. ESSAY I. THE POET. THOSE who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an incli- nation for whatever is elegant ; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doc- trine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our ama- teurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, 10 fiSSAY I. to be carried about; but there is no accurate ad- justment between the spirit arid the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the ma- terial world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a con- tract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence ; arid even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact : Orpheus. Em- pedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swe- denborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but chil- dren of the fire, made of it, and only the same di- vinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet or the THE POET. U man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time. The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pur- suits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter ; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who 12 ESSAY I. does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impres- sions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversa- tion what had befallen him. Yet, in our experi- ence, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to airive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impedi- ment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart. For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect ; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune j or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son ; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three THE POET. 13 arc equal. Each is that which he is essentially, sc that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent. The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the cen- tre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the cre- ator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and dispar- ages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is ac- tion, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamem- non. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he wries primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, In respect to him, secondaries and servants ; as sit- ters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assist- ants who bring building materials to an architect. 2 k4 ESSAY I. For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus mis write the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reason- able, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indif- ferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the neces- sary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conver- sation, the other day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we THE POET. 15 could not sufficiently praise. But when the ques- tion arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from a torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mot- tled sides ; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary. For it is not metres, but a metre-making ar- gument, that makes a poem, — a thought so pas- sionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with* a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought : he has a whole new 3xperience to unfold ; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his for- tune. For the experience of each new age requires a 'new confession, and the world seems always 16 . ESSAY 1. waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither, and had writ- ten hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told : he could tell nothing but that all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we listened ! how credulous ! Society seemed to be compro- mised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome ? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yel- low leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What ! that wonderful spirit has not expired ! These stony moments are still sparkling and ani- mated ! I had fancied that the' oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold ! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A moun- THE .VOET. 17 tain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle ; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration ! And now my chains are to be broken ; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem trans- parent,— and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles ani- mated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise ; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday : then I be- came an animal : now I am invited into the science 2* 18 ESSAY I. of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward ; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water ; but the all-pierc- ing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be. But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier im- pulses, has insured the poet's fidelity to his oifice of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her crea- tures to hirn as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpen- ter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. " Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus " are expressed through images." Things admit THE POET. & of being used as symbols, because nature is a sym- bol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression ; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character ; all condition, of the quality of the life ; all harmony, of health ; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sym- pathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beauti- ful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches : " So every spirit, as it is more pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight, With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For, of the soul, the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make." Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety. The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent ; but these are the retinue of 20 ESSAY I. that Being we have. " The mighty heaven," said Proclus, " exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions ; being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics ; or, the state of science is an index of our self- knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active. No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense ; to the poet, and to all others ; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be suscep- tible of these enchantments of nature ; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the cele- bration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature ? Who does not ? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No ; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their af- fection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, n horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When THE POET. 21 you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic ; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him ; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse but sincere rites. The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, com- pute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill ! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory- stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood 22 ESSAY I. tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and thsy are all poets and mystics ! Beyond this universality of the symbolic lan- guage, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a tem- ple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature ; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversa- tion. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men • just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind ; as it is related of Lord Chatham, thai THE POET- 23 he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Diet unary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts ? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us aa well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythol- ogy, mythologfsts observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances. For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the iife of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re- attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these ; for these works of art are not yet con- secrated in their reading ; but the poet sees them 24 ESSAY I. fall within the great Order not less than the bee- hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Be- sides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though yon add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appre ciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wam- pum, and the commerce of America, are alike. The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the sym- bols through which it is named, — yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and in- habit symbols ; workmen, work, and tools, words THE POET. 25 and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being in- fatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inani- mate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncseus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and proces- sion. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ; perceives that thought is multi- form ; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form ; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. A.11 the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does 3 £6 ESSAY I. not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with ani- mals, with men, and gods ; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes af- ter their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not an- other's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which de- lights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the ar- chives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, be- cause for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymolo- gist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not THE POET. A art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a cer- tain self- regulated motion, or change ; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize her, but baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I re- member that a certain poet described it to me thus : Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus : so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, be- ing preserved, transmits new billions of spores to- morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man ; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she de- taches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is ex- posed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the 28 ESSAY I. accidents of the weary kingdom of time : a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecovera- bly into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them ; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet as- cend, and leap, arid pierce into the deeps of infinite time. So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public gar- den. He was, as I remember, unable to tell direct- ly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he strove THE POET. 29 to express this tranquillity, and, lo ! his chisel haa fashioned out of marble the form of a beautifu' youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become sjjent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, shar- ing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower- bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he over- hears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A. rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell, of 3* • ESSAY I. the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are ; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant : a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordi- nating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature ? This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intel- lect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so mak- ing them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them ? A spy they will not suffer ; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, — him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and ac- companying that. It is a secret which every intellectual man quick- ly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new en- ergy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by aban- donment to the nature of things ; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a THE POET. 31 groat public power, on which he can draw, by un- locking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him : then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequate- ly, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, " with the flower of the mind ;" not with the intel- lect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life ; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the trav- eller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the ani- mal to find his road, so must we do with the divine tinimal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal- wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they 32 ESSAY I. prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dan cing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravish- ment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of indi- dividual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally ex- pressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence ; all but the few who received the true nectar ; and, as it was a spu- rious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an eman- cipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advan- tage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sor- ceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may THE POET. 33 drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men. must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not ' Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight ; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine- stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hun- gry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shall find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and 34 ESSAY I. exhilaration for all men. We seem to be to ached by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds ; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we di- vine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition ; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; — or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point ; or, figure to be a bound of solid ; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain in- cantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls ; when Plato calls the world an animal ; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals ; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward ; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes, — THE POET. 35 «' So in our tree of man, whose nervie root Springs in his top ; " when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as " that white flower which marks extreme old age ; " when Pro- clus calls the universe the statue of the intellect , when Chaucer, in his praise of ' Gentilesse,' com- pares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natu- ral office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold ; when John saw, in the Apoca- lypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit ; when JEsop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts ; — we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence,